Then one day it wasn't anymore.
Actually all that, let's call it borrowing, laid a perfect ground for all future versions of those products/companies - with plenty of educated and demanding users thereof.
(btw rev.engineering was good fun.. but that's a forgotten land now)
We are now a fast shrinking country, poor and even today the political scene is a joke.
IMHO the ideological markets are very dangerous, gives you the wrong feedback on your output and makes you completely reliant.
USSR pumps oil, digs minerals and uses the income from that to purchase stuff from Bulgaria not because Bulgaria is the best(it might have been the best or very good at one point) but because politics. Then Bulgaria doesn't have proper feedback and instead of investing to advance its computer business keeps doing the same when the west with their real markets leaps ahead. Then one day the only customer who bought Bulgarian stuff for ideological reasons is gone and Bulgaria finds out that they don't have any customers anymore because they didn't invest in advancing their tech because they didn't need to.
Unfortunately, the west today has a similar problem of ideology based markets but its nowhere nearly as bad as the situation in Communist Bulgaria.
One argument might be, if the system worked why wouldn't keep doing it? Because its again very dangerous. If the USSR survived and Bulgaria was kept being the tech powerhouse of USSR with a few nodes behind the state of the art, Bulgaria might have been compelled to send the troops for the invasions USSR might have started because that's how empires work(Bulgarian economy collapsing the moment Russia decides not buying from Bulgaria since it disobeys). Notice that the Russian soldiers in Ukraine come from far eastern regions of the Russian federation, that would have been the fate of Bulgaria today.
List of countries which happily participated in USA's invasion of Iraq wants to say hello!
However I can also say that because of climate change, certain regions are now experiencing drought, I can specifically mention the far South-East near the border to Turkey. Rural villages are dying, but also lacking water, there is almost no water underground and it rains less and less, and the winters are no longer even winters. Wells fill up only once during winter and are emptied out within a few weeks before the crops even grow and produce fruit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107924
And a small historical bit of snark that's probably in the book (which I haven't had a chance to read yet):
https://axle.events/events/prezentaciya-na-balkan-cyberia-c7...
I have loved everything I've learned about it since, even thinking of learning Bulgarian!
What a cool place, your country.
This post for me is an instance of that weird effect when once you start looking into something you see it everywhere..
Every other treatment I've ever seen for describing the Soviet computing and internet development has always just been a lazy "well it wasn't innovative like silicon valley" which, while not necessarily wrong, sounds more like awkward and insecure attempt at justifying our own processes, and also isn't all that descriptive or useful.
This isn't surprising because we still have a very heavy Cold War stink on history to do with the USSR and just continue to discover we were wrong about certain aspects of that experiment or didnt quite fully understand it without heavy ideological bias.
I think the wrongness of popular perception tends to go in the other direction. People often misunderstand just how badly the Soviet bloc lagged in high technology, precision manufacturing at scale, etc. This makes sense because they remember and have read about the military parity, the brief period of (very roughly) comparable middle class standard of living, etc. But Moore's law (among other things) dramatically exacerbated the technology gap - you can have, say, a steel or oil industry that's a couple of decades behind the state of the art. An IC industry that far behind is barely a meaningful IC industry at all.
It depends on the decade and if we're are talking about the Soviet Union, keeping in mind that Warsaw Pact countries also had their own trajectories and specifics, like the article mentions. By the 1970s the Soviets themselves realized they were lagging behind, and decided to mostly "borrow" Western designs. So it isn't just us judging them from an orange forum years later, it was a judgement they came to on their own at that time. In the end they were cloning the computer systems of the West, not vice-versa. And, if we know anything about the Soviets, is they did not like to lose face. Everything from space to sports was always them showing off their superiority, so the decision to concede and start copying computer systems designed by the "evil capitalists" likely wasn't done lightly.
It's not really how the Soviet Union operated, this sort of "technology transfer" was fundamental to Soviet development from the start. It was so ingrained in Soviet leadership that it was sometimes counterproductive - one famous example is Beria's insistence on strictly following the atomic bomb designs lifted from the Manhattan project which probably didn't make the bomb makers' jobs any easier. A down-to-the-last-rivet replica of the B-29 was also not what Tupolev would have done without orders from the top.
Romania also had significant semiconductor industry and DDR too, such as Kombinat Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" Erfurt.
I'm disappointed the article is so eager to tag late communist Bulgaria "repressive". The same myopic vision where Bulgaria can be of no significance, but also where socialist regime can manifest with nothing but repression.
As for repressions, intellectuals getting censored, assasinated even [1].
Turkic and Roma populations getting forcibly assimilated [2].
Numerous personal accounts of asset seizure and blatant corruption among party members.
Is that repression to call it out or just enough to fall below the threshold?
With regards to forcible assimilations, I believe France, Denmark and Turkey did more or less the same stuff in the time frame. These are all democratic, capitalist NATO-member countries which are not always in the same sentence with "repressive". Again, that is tragic, but I wonder if most countries in the world aren't having worse contemporary skeletons in their closets.
I'm not challenging the actual grinding of people between state gears, just the myopic outlook where it is customary to use it against certain regimes' life experience but not others. People are conditioned to assume it was a torment to live in Bulgaria in 1980. The same people don't assume it was a torment to live in contemporary Turkey. In practice, both had their highs and lows.
With regards to asset seizure, I don't believe you were supposed to have any under socialism.
Oh, yes, kind of:
> “The [US] capitalists behaved like socialists while the [Soviet] socialists behaved like capitalists.” In other words, the United States’ internet precursor ARPANET was achieved through strong government support and subsidies, whereas the Soviet attempts were torpedoed by the “self-interest” of its bureaucrats and experts. The Bulgarian case is different because it did succeed—partly due to the fact that Petrov’s protagonists were able to outplay the capitalists at their own game. They copied the code and then rewrote it.
It is the end of history predicted by Karl Marx, but it had played in a different way that he thought. It played in a way Fukuyama described in retrospect. Capitalism is no longer "pure" capitalism, and communism is no longer "pure" communism. The thesis and the antithesis mated and gave rise to something in between. Or rather they morphed both, but the transformation of capitalism was more successful. Though China probably wouldn't agree with this last statement.
But looking at USA it use a lot of government funds spent on different projects with a goal to spur up progress. ARPANET is just one example, the other one is Apollo project or commercialization of space which is going on right now. And we can see in China a free market or at least market that is much more free than in USSR.
It seems it is not the end of history, it is more like an end of history. But I agree with Erik Hoel[1] it is no good in trying to apply Hegel to history, but his models are good to talk about politics.
[1] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-end-of-online-...
